According to all the people he’s leaked his witness statement to, Boris Johnson will tell the Covid inquiry not to pay much attention to WhatsApp messages on the basis that we can never know “the tone in which they were intended … Dark humour is lost or morphs into mockery.” Totally. Who among us can honestly say we are capable of parsing a WhatsApp message from Dominic Cummings dated 23 August 2020 that reads: “I also must stress I think leaving Hancock in post is a big mistake – he is a proven liar who nobody believes or shd believe on anything, and we face going into autumn crisis with the cunt in charge of NHS still.”
Does it help that Cummings has appeared before the inquiry and explained that this meant he was stressing that leaving Hancock in post was a big mistake, because he was a proven liar who nobody believed or should believe on anything, and that the UK faced going into an autumn Covid crisis with the … health secretary … in charge of the NHS still? No. No it doesn’t help. That could mean anything, right? I’m positively drowning in its subtleties here, and like many people I simply can’t wait for Johnson to take the stand at the inquiry on Wednesday and Thursday so he can explain that what this message actually implied was, “Boris Johnson saved lives”.
